davidmr

I'm not sure what better to call it. Charm++ (its core) was around ruining the lives of chemistry grad students and their sysadmins long, long before pycharm was a twinkle in its creators' eyes. I'm sure jetbrains won't be coming for it any time soon.

I’m in the same boat. I’ll be moving from the US to the UK shortly, and my options for what to do to keep my US number (and keep it functional while I’m in the UK) are pretty limited outside of google voice. Especially since, as you noted, Twilio isn’t really priced for personal use.

GV isn’t bad, it’s just my absolute last resort given how capricious Google seems to be with these non-core services.

In general, I'm pretty happy about this. The more I used Atomic Host, the more I liked it. While it was a pretty dramatic departure from Fedora's dnf/rpm world, I really like how rpm-ostree handled the Atomic update/rollback stuff. I thought it was a nice middle ground between a traditional Linux distro and Container Linux's "just slap a new image down to disk for upgrades". I think there's a time and place for both and Atomic Host had a nice merging. Container Linux with the rpm-ostree tooling should be really nice for orgs that want to customize their distributions.

I'm only a novice Ignition user though, so I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me what benefit it has over kickstart for provisioning nodes and clusters that makes Red Hat want to keep using it. Kickstart clearly has way more configurability for deciding how you want the host to be provisioned (at the expense of added complexity), so the only place I see Ignition adding value is that it's a really easy way to group nodes and assign roles by hostname, like a lightweight Cobbler install or something. Am I missing something else?

Yes, they announced at the Red Hat summit that they'll be phasing out development of rkt, though of course will do nothing to stop outside development. Between docker and cri-o, I think they decided that the need for a third supported and actively developed runtime wasn't enough to justify the effort. I'm excited to have the rkt developers work on cri-o, assuming that's where they're going.

It’s still a bit iffy. The lack of a proper S3 sleep state is a big, big problem for me. I lose about 6% of the battery life an hour in sleep on F28, and it generates enough heat that I don't feel comfortable putting it in its sleeve while in sleep. Some people have had good luck patching the ACPI tables, but that doesn't work on every distro. I can hibernate okay, but that's really much worse than sleeping.

Other than the power issues, it's a lovely laptop.

I don't regret buying it at all because I don't really mind shaking out problems with new hardware and I usually keep my laptops for ~6 years, but if it's a big deal, I'd buy a used 5th gen X1. Those work flawlessly.

The DOE (and DOD, but with whom I’m less familiar) tends to spread out these purchases over multiple vendors to keep multiple US-based providers able to build and support these machines (and I imagine to keep costs competitive).

The last few acquisitions by ORNL and LANL have been Crays while ANL and LLNL were buying IBM Blue Genes. With this generation, it looks like things have switched. As another poster mentioned, it certainly seems like ANL’s next one will be Cray/Intel. It was going to be based on Knight’s Hill, but Intel cancelling that sort of put the architecture up for grabs.

This seems pretty cool in principle, but I got as far as a single nonreplicated MDS before I lost interest in trying it out at this stage.

Admittedly, my background is in HPC where metadata performance and reliability requirements would preclude using something like this. Does anyone who is a more familiar with FreeBSD than I am (which is pretty much anyone who’s used it in the last 10 years) have any more information on long their term plans for at least replicated block storage failover or cache coherency in an active/active MDS setup?

I mean I don’t really want to argue about it because it seems like a silly thing to argue about, but just because you aren’t interested doesn’t mean nobody else is. Here’s a thread from the November list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800

People steal technology because someone else’s is better and it’s cheaper than doing the R&D yourself. If the US just quietly made better computers and there was no ranking, I’m certain China and Russia would still be stealing IP.

Just a point of order: Summit isn’t used for weapons work. You have to go down to 6 and 7 on the current list to find one that is.

The DOD stopped reporting many of their computers to the list though, so it’s anyone’s guess where those would land.

Edit: US weapons work that is. I would imagine China uses at least one of theirs for classified work.

This competition has been going on quite a while. Is there any evidence it has led to any of that?

The rankings come out every June and November. They’re always talked about here because big computers are really cool.

The labs and supercomputer manufacturers also need this narrative to get continued funding from Congress. I spent many years in DOE supercomputing labs, and there was a heavy emphasis on competition whenever you wanted to knock loose a few hundred million dollars to buy a new computer.

There’s no call to be so rude. The RH/CoreOS people here are acting in good faith, I think they’re being exceptionally helpful, and they don’t even need to be answering questions at all.

Thanks for the response! My immediate question after I read the article yesterday was on the future of Fedora (and RHEL) Atomic.

Both you and the press release mention that CL will be supported for a while, but it's not clear what's going to happen with Atomic. My entirely unscientific and feels-based opinion is that Atomic seems to be getting a little more traction in the Workstation/SilverBlue area at the moment. rpm-ostree is really unique tooling, and I'd hate to see it go away; the more I use it, the more I like it!

At any rate, the market share of CL is probably substantially greater than that of Atomic, but there are those of us who are rolling out k8s clusters based on Atomic. It would be nice to know sooner rather than later if we're wasting our time!

The bits about the OpenShift integration are interesting I guess, but buried about halfway down is the news that they intend CoreOS' Container Linux to supplant their existing Fedora/RHEL Atomic Host, and Brandon Philips from CoreOS says that they're be continuing to base it around Ignition[0]

I'm genuinely surprised at this. RH has put a ton of work into rpm-ostree for a long time. I guess there's a chance they'll meld it somehow with Ignition and Container Linux's Chrome OS bits when they turn it into Red Hat Container Linux or whatever it'll be called, but it's surprising to see Red Hat supporting a Linux distro not based of of RPMs and installed with kickstart/anaconda.

[0] https://twitter.com/BrandonPhilips/status/993880972583092225

I’m so unused to seeing a corporation act in the interests of their customers explicitly counter to the wishes of law enforcement and the intelligence community that I’m racking my brain trying to think of ulterior motives that explain why Apple might have this.

Either way, on the surface, I’m quite pleased by this development.

This isn’t even top 20 in this thread, but here’s mine: maybe 17 years ago, we upgraded our department server from a big old Sun 4/690 running sunos to a shiny new Ultra80 running Solaris.

Among the many functions this server has was to host a bunch of black and white x terminals. Probably only a few people here ever used those (although more than most other online forums!), but basically the idea is that they plug into the network, at power on they tftp down the image for the x server, they boot and allow you to run x client apps on the server, an 80s thin client implementation. So we upgrade the server and things are working pretty well, especially for such a major upgrade.

My boss/mentor at the time is truly brilliant, so we really had most everything thought of. The only thing that was off was that all of a sudden the xterms all stopped booting. We couldn't figure it out. Network sniffers didn't show anything useful--we were just baffled.

On a whim, we decided to take the tftp server out of inetd control and truss it (Solaris equivalent of strace). The first time? Worked perfectly--our test xterm booted just fine. Eventually we figured out that the new server was so fast that the speed of the tftp transfer was triggering a problem on the Ethernet card firmware of the xterms and by using truss, it slowed down the transfer and bypassed the bug.

Solution: In inetd.conf, we just spawned in.tftpd with "truss -o /dev/null". Never saw the issue again.

Regarding your first point, that's not what I meant and you know it. Dark matter is the current theory explaining many different astronomical observations. It explains quite a lot of observations, so something pretty conclusive will need to happen for people to abandon it. Either new observations will disprove it or a new theory will come about that makes some prediction that can be observed that cannot for with current theories. I hope something like that happens! New science would be so much cooler than dark matter, but at the moment it doesn't seem likely.

I'm not sure I see how your second point is relevant. You seem to imply that I think that academics are infallible in all areas not even related to their expertise. Do you truly see no difference between non-statistics researchers incorrectly calculating statistical values and dozens of unrelated experiments all leading to the same result?

I think you might have missed my point. I'm not saying that dark matter skeptics are crackpots because they don't believe in dark matter. I'm saying that if people think they can disprove the existence of dark matter because you can apply some high school arithmetic and claim that Keplerian law is violated, then you are a crackpot.

Someone else unwittingly suggested a parallel to Fermat, which I think hits the nail on the head exactly. If someone thinks they can prove Fermat's last theorem with some high school geometry, odds are pretty good they're a crackpot. If they're a well-regarded mathematician and they can build off new mathematics and make a few very complicated leaps by discovering new mathematics of their own, then people take them more seriously.

Scott Aaronson has a really great take on this here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304

As an aside that's probably only interesting to me, I went to a Great Books college. It's one of those hippy dippy liberal arts schools where there are no electives, no textbooks, no lectures, just primary sources. You learn mathematics by reading Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton, etc.

At any rate, for first-year "Labratory" class, you trace the atomic theory from the Greeks to roughly Avogadro. Along the way you read papers by and replicate the experiments of many influencial scientists along the way. When I mention that the above crackpots are "wrong", I don't mean it in the sense of the aether or analogous theories along the way to the atomic theory, namely phlogiston or caloric, two previous theories of heat. Those theories did not explain new observations and were rightly discarded along the way. Priestly and Lavoisier were brilliant and tried to make theory match observation, so now even though their theories are discarded, their work still stands on its own for the time. I wouldn't call them wrong. There's a definite difference between them and theories that are just wrong.

Nobody's going to get a Nobel Prize when they just make the world believe that they have obviated the need for dark matter by pulling out some high school math and some Kepler proofs.

Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that proves a MOND theory in a way that shows conclusively that dark matter is not needed to explain all current observations and in fact cannot remain compatible with this new observation.

There's a big difference between the two, I think.

I used to work in a well-regarded Astronomy and Astrophysics department at a research university. Every few months, I would go through the department "crackpot folder" when I was especially bored.

Every couple days the department chair or some well-known professor would get a letter (this was before most of the crackpots had email accounts, I guess) claiming that some theory--particularly general relativity--was wrong and all it took was a simple application of high school arithmetic to see it.

One of our faculty happened to coin the phrase "dark energy" while I was there, and man did the letters start coming in after that. Of course, the only absolutely universal commonality among all of the letters was that they were all nonsense, like the above.

In general, I felt sort of bad because you could tell that a lot of these people were really not well, but it's still hard for me to see things from someone's perspective who genuinely believes that the entire astrophysics community (save a tiny handful of contrarian actual physicists) has somehow engaged in a massive conspiracy to ignore introductory physics in favor of some other vastly more complicated theory for absolutely no possible benefit. (Especially when these professors are literally teaching introductory physics to students while they're pursuing their research.)

I’m sorry, but without some sort of citation from a reputable source, I just don’t buy this as a contributing factor at all and call BS.

I spent years as a student and working at a large research University and let’s be very, very generous and say that there were 30 people detailed to this “#metoo incident” mitigation and action squad. Of the thousands and thousands of other nonfaculty staff payroll; of the many millions the library system pays for journal access alone, let alone special collections and acquisition; of the cost of running the steam for heating the buildings, the computing infrastructure; etc., etc. how non-trivial do you expect this Title IV portion to be?

Thanks for your commentary too. I’m starting to learn Haskell, and the nature of the language seems to lead to less “best practices” articles out there.

Seeing knowledgeable people comment on things written by other knowledgeable people seems to be the best way to learn how Haskell is done in the wild (i.e. anything outside the text I’m learning Haskell from at the moment)!

The current “alcohol is the strongest risk factor for dementia” title is not in the text, nor is it accurate. A more accurate title would be “alcohol use disorders are...” or “alcohol abuse is...”

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that it was okay. My text does read that way and I appreciate the opportunity to elaborate.

I too would like the world more if there were less of that. I can't think of a lot of philanthropists off the top of my head who made their fortunes from unambiguously morally-good methods. My personal opinion is that we're probably on an upward trajectory. Comparing how Gates made his fortune with the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, etc. I think Microsoft comes out on balance a bit better.

I’m afraid I fail to see the relevance of this post to the matter at hand. Did his company do some despicable things, and did he have anything to do with it? Yes. I think most corporations of a certain size do.

The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad that posts like yours above just seem catty to me.

I’ve found it kind of funny and ironic that Bill was always the evil one and Steve Jobs was the cool “think different” upstart, but looking back on their entire lives, Bill has done so, so much more to make the world we live in a better place for everyone.

I did say that there were edge cases. Is encoding no regional information in local time better than encoding some that works pretty well in many common cases?

This wasn't the first time someone tried to make something better than time zones and our silly days-weeks-months-years system, and I doubt it will be the last. It probably goes back much further, but I know that the French tried to decimalize time in the revolution when they were rationalizing all the other measurements. (see The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, without question the finest nonfiction book Ive ever read.)

The reason I think it doesn't catch on is that what we have really isn't too bad. If I'm thinking locally, everything works perfectly. If I'm trying to schedule a meeting with my colleagues in Singapore, I just remember a single number, 14 and apply it to my time. I know that right this minute, it's 21:40 in Singapore, and I know that the sun is down, everyone is home and preparing to go to bed. With UTC, I have to remember that the sun rises at 23:00UTC, do a little math, figure people show up in the office around three hours after the sunrise, etc. Toss in offices in London, Shanghai, Cape Town, Melbourne, etc. and it gets confusing.

Modulo 24 math is simple enough that anyone can do it, and looking up the offset for a city is much easier than finding out a "normal" person's schedule in that city.

Yes of course it gets a little silly with edge cases around DST and strange places (good trivia question: with what city does the South Pole share its time zone? A: Auckland, NZ, where the logistics are handled or anywhere in NZ really), but it works 99% of the time.

Could we make it work if we just decided to? Of course! Implementing the metric system was much harder, and we did that (well, most of us did, of course) because there were huge benefits to being on the same measure. Are there equally huge benefits to being on the same time zone? I doubt it.

Thanks; I have, but I thought I might as well try to do it right. If after another month or so, I still have "Emacs pinkie", I might just bite the bullet and go to evil mode.

Of all the things that make me wish I were smarter, being able to do something with public policy about heroin addiction is very near the top of the list.

I grew up in the nineties and my set of friends and I were all self-medicating our way through our teenage angst and emotional problems to some degree or another. It seems like almost overnight heroin showed up in our scene, not because anyone was addicted to opiate pain medication, but just because someone's dealer got some, exactly like this article describes.

Within just a couple of years, the collection of friends had an enormous rift right down the middle: half had tried and become addicted to heroin, and the other half of us felt like we had no choice but to get out of the scene and get our shit together.

To this day, I have no idea what factors other than chance put someone in the former group vs. the latter. Those of us that went into the latter group weren't any smarter and we didn't have better support networks. Of the dozen or so people in the former, maybe only 2-3 came out of it successful in the long-term. Everyone else is either dead, in jail, or living as addicts. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this to no effect.

Becoming a heroin addict isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy. It's the most awful thing to see someone you love go through that I can think of. Treating it as a criminal matter instead of a public health matter is absolutely the worst possible way to deal with it.